Few pieces of music are as stirring as the last movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony, as many politicians have discovered

DO YOU get a lump in your throat—as Hitler did—with the terrifying fanfare that opens the choral movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony? Do your eyes mist over at the first throaty choral outburst of: Freude, schöner Götterfunken? The wavy-haired composer's last symphonic work, in D minor, is a mass of paradoxes and contradictions. Its status as an icon of western classical music is unquestionable: in order that listeners could enjoy the entire work at one sitting, the 74-minute ninth symphony was used to set the standard capacity for a compact disc. Next month, when it is auctioned at Sotheby's, a copyist's manuscript of the work, replete with Beethoven's last scribbled revisions, is expected to fetch more than any manuscript of classical music has done before.

If the ninth symphony is the most powerful symbol of absolute music in the classical music canon, it is also the most politicised work of all time. An emblem of liberal internationalism, the theme of the “Ode to Joy”, Beethoven's choral setting of Schiller's poem in the symphony's finale, has also been appropriated by hardened nationalists. French revolutionaries adopted it; Hitler much admired its Teutonic triumphalism and had Wilhelm Furtwängler conduct the work at his birthday concerts in 1937 and 1942; Ian Smith made it Rhodesia's national anthem.

But the tune has also been the song of freedom lovers and democrats. In 1956, over three decades before reunification, East and West Germany fielded a joint team of athletes to the Olympic games. Their anthem? Beethoven's “Ode to Joy”. When Leonard Bernstein conducted the ninth symphony at a Christmas Day concert to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he transformed the last movement into an “Ode to Freedom”, substituting the German “Freiheit” (freedom) for “Freude” (joy); for over 30 years, the tune has been the official anthem of the European Union.

What is it about Beethoven's last symphony that admits such wildly divergent interpretations and appropriations, and how did it manage to overcome its associations with Nazism to become the anthem of pan-European democracy? These are questions that lie at the heart of Esteban Buch's timely book, published in France four years ago and now translated into English for the first time.

Mr Buch, a Brazilian-born historian and musicologist, attempts nothing less than a cultural history of the “Ode to Joy”. Instead of viewing the piece as the apotheosis of symphonic thinking—as so many of Beethoven's biographers and critics have done in the past—Mr Buch locates it in a tradition of popular, patriotic song-writing that has its roots in national anthems, like “God Save the Queen”, and such revolutionary tunes as the “Marseillaise”. This, he believes, lies behind Beethoven's decision to use voices in a symphony, previously a purely instrumental musical form.

Many empires and nation states believed that music could be made to galvanise populations into patriotic feeling, and they employed the foremost composers of the Enlightenment to ensure their success. When Joseph Haydn wrote the music that would become the anthem of the Austro-Hungarian empire (and, later, “Deutschland, über alles”) his brief was to compose a melody that would have the same effect on public consciousness as the British national anthem.

Beethoven was also an enthusiastic player in this game of national prestige and he tried to position himself as the most important composer in Austria, and in Europe. To celebrate the hegemony of European power at the 1814 Congress of Vienna, he composed a cantata, “Der Glorreiche Augenblick”, known in English as “The Glorious Moment”. This idealistic and fervently pro-monarchist piece, which culminates in a hymn to European ideals, was one of the models for the later structure of the ninth symphony's finale, written a decade later, and goes some way to explain why so many people think of “Ode to Joy” as the embodiment of democratic, republican freedoms.

Mr Buch's Beethoven is a different musician from the tortured genius of historical imagination, and his rethinking of the Beethoven myth has important implications for the ninth symphony. However, in focusing almost entirely on the “Ode to Joy” and its myriad appropriations, Mr Buch fails to explain the significance of the rest of the symphony. For all its importance, the theme is only one ingredient of the finale, itself only one of four movements. Mr Buch gives scant space to the debates surrounding the symphony's position as the most famous piece of concert-hall music ever composed—one of the book's failings along with its occasionally academic tone, even in Richard Miller's translation.

But these are more than compensated for by the richness of the central argument. Mr Buch convincingly demonstrates how the growth of Beethoven's posthumous reputation as the musical embodiment of genius and humanism is paralleled by the development of European identity, surviving—as Richard Wagner did not—its association with the Third Reich.

There may come a time when Beethoven no longer represents democratic ideals in quite this way, but in examining the symbiotic relationship between music and politics, Mr Buch offers a new view of the convoluted route by which the composer's music, and the ninth symphony in particular, came to form the soundtrack of the aspirations of the European dream.